San Antonio College Library

After trying to help Benjamin Pearl, an undernourished, nearly feral eleven-year-old boy living in the Montana wilderness, social worker Pete Snow comes face-to-face with the boy's profoundly disturbed father, Jeremiah.

"The middle years, caught between children and parents, free of neither: the past stretches back too densely, it is too thickly populated, the future has not thinned yet." That is the emotional territory where sit, jelled, the four main characters of Drabble's new, loose, London-based, sympathetic, and loopingly optimistic novel. One's a social worker; one a journalist who lost an arm years ago in Kurdistan; one's a doctor; and chiefly -- although...